Amazing

It seems that President Obama has called the U.S. Supreme Court a body of “unelected” officials who have no business saying whether a law passed by the elected Congress exceeds the powers granted the legislature by the Constitution or not.

Hello, Mister President, I understood that you were at one time a professor of constitutional law and that statement seems to be like ignoring more than 200 years of U.S. judicial history, law and tradition.

Things are getting really weird in the U.S. and this old journalist/soldier isn’t sure what to make of it all.

It has been accepted since about 1803, that one – and probably the most important – of the roles of U.S. Supreme Court is to decide whether or not specific laws and actions by the other two branches of the federal government meet the test of being within their constitutional powers. It is, to put it bluntly, part of the checks and balances designed into the U.S. Constitution in order to protect the people from government excesses.

In this case, the law being challenged is the president’s signature health care reform act, and – if indications from the questioning of several members (a majority) bear any validity – will be struck down by the court as exceeding the congressional powers as designated in the constitution.

What blows me away is not that President Obama hopes that the court will uphold the law, but his denigrating the court as unelected and therefore should not invalidate a law that has been passed by the majority in any of  our several political divisions and subdivisions.

Hello, were that the case then the “separate but equal doctrine” and all the “Jim Crow” laws that were passed to implement that doctrine would still be in effect and it is very unlikely that the president would even have  been allowed to serve or run.

Be that as it may, what is distressing me more than anything is the absolutely devolution of anything resembling respect for the law, the courts, the system and tradition. We seem to have decided that we would rather not be a nation governed by a set of laws that is – or at least should be and is the goal we strive for – applied equally to all comers, where people are judged not by their status, color of their skin, their sex, their religion, their ancestors or their ideology, but by the fact that they are individual humans, with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness.

Without respect, even for those viewpoints that disagree with our own, then how can we expect others to respect each of us as individuals.

It is with sadness and regret that I point 0ut that such rhetoric as President Obama’s does little to engender any respect for any decision coming from the U.S. Supreme Court whether it is 9-0 or 5-4 in either upholding or striking down any law or government action.

Without that respect, then there are no limits on what Congress and the Executive Branch are able to do. There will be no checks or balances against their excesses. We will, in reality, then be governed by the whims of men (and women) and not by law which really does so much to bind our society together.

Question: Is that truly the path we want to follow?